Page 2757 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 6 June 2012
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the Greens get out of this. How many large donations did the Greens get in that period that made them think: “Perhaps this is not a very good idea after all. Perhaps Mr Smyth’s prescience does not actually serve our purpose at all.”
It is not the case, as the attorney said, that we cannot debate this and that we should not be able to debate this today because it is the same in substance as the amendments I brought in the other day. If that were the case, he would have moved and asked the Speaker to rule against it today. But he did not.
For instance, Ms Hunter tabled a bill this morning which I think would offend the same rule somewhat substantially. I think I will be asking the Speaker for a ruling on that because, although Ms Hunter says that she is just doing a fix-up, she is not doing a fix-up; she is revisiting things that she lost in the debate last month.
Mr Assistant Speaker, this is an important issue about transparency, about honesty, about changing the environment in which we fund elections. What we are seeing here today is the Greens and the Labor Party colluding to allow the warfare to continue. The arms race of election funding will be allowed to continue.
We do not know how much money has been transferred out of the Labor Club into the Labor Party, and in what form, and we will not know until the Labor Club reports again in about September this year. By that time, I think that we will have found that there would have been a number of potential breaches of Mr Smyth’s legislation, which has been agreed to in principle by this place.
The only people who are sticking to their principles today are the Canberra Liberals. The Greens have abandoned their principles, and I wonder what they were paid to do that.
MR ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Mr Hargreaves): Before I proceed, Mr Smyth—Mrs Dunne, in relation to that last question that you posed to the chamber, I urge you to reflect on the way in which you put that, because that could be regarded as a reflection upon a group, and an adverse one. I am not going to rule it out of order at the moment, but I would just ask you to reflect on it, please.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (4.52): It is an interesting world that we live in where one day you can have in-principle support for a bill and then, in a period later, that in-principle support disappears. The things that drove the in-principle support to be given actually came to being, came to fruition. But then the Greens go weak at the knees and refuse to enforce the law that they believe should come into place.
Let me address Mr Corbell and this notion that somehow it is unconscionable, inappropriate and retrospective. Retrospectivity says that today I will do something that makes something that happened last week, last month or last year a criminal act. That is not what I did. I said, “From the day that I table my bill, 22 June, should this happen, it will be considered to have been a breach of the law.” That is not retrospective in any way, shape or form.
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